Welcome to “My Cyber Why”! — a glimpse into the life and work of experts from around the world who have dedicated themselves to protecting cyberspace. There’s no shortage of scary headlines about the latest hacks and malware releases. But what doesn’t make the headlines are the inspiring stories of…

“The most important piece of architecture is to understand the why: why it is that you are doing what it is that you are doing. Understanding the why leads you to the how. Understand it in the context of the broader business and organization goals context and let that be…

In order to get started developing a cybersecurity architecture, we need to gather a few raw materials first. These are the items that will set the context for all the design work that we will undertake in subsequent chapters. Specifically, we need to first obtain a baseline understanding of the…

“Because security architecture is by nature a “bridge” or translation, the aspects of the architecture process that are most important are going to change from organization to organization. It might be a culture change that is most important for one organization, just getting things written down in the first place…

“I think the most important part of the architecture process is risk, informed by data. Nowadays, it’s all about the data. We’ve moved beyond building strategies to protect a given server, or service. In reality, what you really need are strategies to protect the data.” …

In this series, we’ve discussed what security architecture is conceptually, describing and providing an introduction to some of the standards and frameworks that are involved in effecting it in an organization. The last topic that we will cover before we get into the “meat” of actually performing the work of…

The last framework that we will look at is the Open Security Architecture (OSA). OSA is a community-driven effort to develop a model for security architecture. By community-driven, we mean that it is a set of individual elements contributed by whoever has the willingness and acumen to do so, with…

Continuing our deeper dive into security architectures, this week we’ll cover the Open Enterprise Security Architecture (O-ESA) from the Open Group. One of the areas where many more formal security architecture models struggle is in the capacity to handle change within the organization. Recognizing that change in the technology ecosystem…

“The value proposition of security architecture is simple. If you have a security architecture and you’re able to understand how that architecture enables and supports achieving the objectives that you want, it gives you, as the owner of those objectives, confidence that you’re really going to get them. If you…